The Plant Finder

Doing research and making informed choices save the gardener money, work and time. The best plants for a location and a good plan will provide rewards for many years.

At almost 1,000 pages, The Plant Finder is big enough to contain 5,000 carefully researched entries on the best garden plant varieties for every zone. Yet it's compact enough to be portable. Kept on the bookshelf or carried to the garden center, it's every gardener's best reference. Based on the material used in the classic Flora: The Gardener's Bible, The Plant Finder helps every gardener match the latest, hardiest and most favored plants to specific location, soil and climate.

The book is organized by major plant groups. Each section opens with a comprehensive plant selection table featuring all the plants in that section and showing, at a glance, all the characteristic growth habits and needs of each plant. Once you identify a suitable plant, you check the extensive entry for a more detailed description. Each description includes notes on origins, cultivation requirements, growth habit, propagation, pests and diseases -- and more.

The Plant Finder will be useful to the many thousands of garden and landscape professionals wanting a comprehensive reference. But it will also be a complete resource for the amateur gardener who makes a big investment in new plants every year, constantly changing and improving the garden. This market numbers in the millions, with an annual budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, a passionate interest in gardens, and a strong will to find the best plants and put them in the right place.

Tony Rodd is a former horticultural botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia. He has worked as a consultant on reference books for more than 20 years, with a specialty in plant identification. He also photographs plants and grows his own collection of unusual ones.

Geoff Bryant is a New Zealand-based horticultural writer and photographer and was a plant propagator and nurseryman for some 10 years. He has written 11 books, including several plant propagation handbooks, as well as numerous magazine articles illustrated with his own photographs.